Schwarz, Daniel, Traber, Denise and Benoit, Kenneth
(2015)
Estimating intra-party preferences: comparing speeches to
votes.
Political Science Research and Methods
.
ISSN 2049-8470
Abstract
Well-established methods exist for measuring party positions, but reliable means for estimating
intra-party preferences remain underdeveloped. While most efforts focus on estimating
the ideal points of individual legislators based on inductive scaling of roll call
votes, this data suffers from two problems: selection bias due to unrecorded votes, and
strong party discipline which tends to make voting a strategic rather than a sincere indication
of preferences. By contrast, legislative speeches are relatively unconstrained, since
party leaders are less likely to punish MPs for speaking freely as long as they vote with the
party line. Yet the differences between roll call estimations and text scalings remain essentially
unexplored, despite the growing application of statistical analysis of textual data
to measure policy preferences. Our paper addresses this lacuna by exploiting a rich feature
of the Swiss legislature: On most bills, legislators both vote and speak many times.
Using this data, we compare text-based scaling of ideal points to vote-based scaling from
a crucial piece of energy legislation. Our findings confirm that text scalings reveal larger
intra-party differences than roll calls. Using regression models we further explain the differences
between roll call and text scalings by attributing differences to constituency-level
preferences for energy policy.
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